in secular society during the last two centuries, as it did yield to the compulsion of those that were let loose in the two that preceded them.  It has never subjected questions of faith and morals to popular vote nor has it determined discipline by parliamentary practice under a well developed party system, therefore it has preserved its unity, its integrity and its just standard of comparative values.  On the other hand, it has held so stubbornly to some of the ill ways of Renaissance centralization, which are in no sense consonant with its character, that it has failed to retard the constant movement of society away from a life wherein religion was the dominating and coordinating force, while at the present crisis it is as yet hardly more able than a divisive Protestantism to offer the regenerative energy that a desperate case demands.

I do not know whether secular society is responsible for the decadence of religion, or the decadence of religion is responsible for the failure of secular society, nor does it particularly matter.  What I am concerned with is a condition amounting to almost complete severance between the two, and how we may “knit up this ravelled sleeve” of life so that once more we may have an wholesome unity in place of the present disunity; for until this is accomplished, until once more religion enters into the very marrow of social being, enters with all its powers of judgment and determination and co-ordination and creative energy, just so long shall we seek in vain for our way out into the Great Peace of righteous and consistent living.

Of course there is only one sure way, one method by which this, and all our manifold difficulties, can be resolved, and that is through the achieved enlightenment of the individual.  As I have insisted in each of these lectures, salvation is not through machinery but through the individual soul, for it is life itself that is operating, not the instruments that man devises in his ingenuity.  Yet the mechanism is of great value for even itself may give aid and stimulus in the personal regenerative process, or, on the contrary, it may deter this by the confusing and misleading influences it creates.  Therefore we are bound to regard material reforms, and of these, as they suggest themselves in the field of organized religion, I propose to speak.

No one will deny the progressive alienation of life from religion that has developed since the Reformation and has now reached a point of almost complete severance.  Religion, once a public preoccupation, has now withdrawn to the fastnesses of the individual soul, when it has not vanished altogether, as it has in the case of the majority of citizens of this Republic in so far as definite faith, explicit belief, application, practice and action are concerned.  In the hermitage that some still make within themselves, religion still lives on as ardent and as potent and as regenerative as before, but in general, if we are to judge from the conduct of recent life, it is held, when it is accepted at all, with a certain formality, and is neither cherished with conviction nor allowed to interfere with the everyday life of the practical man.  As a great English statesman remarked in the last century, “No one has a higher regard for religion than I, but when it comes to intruding it into public affairs, well, really—!”